


patient / fine / balanced / kind

by minirovks



Category: Homestuck
Genre: (restrictive (but there aren't any particular details about ed habits themselves)), Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Character Study, Eating Disorders, Gen, Humanstuck, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, POV Second Person, Sadstuck, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:00:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27617309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minirovks/pseuds/minirovks
Summary: There is nothing left in you except a gnawing feeling of weakness, an absence of power. You try to push it back as far as it can go. It chews your insides and growls in its sleep. When everything falls apart, you need something to control, and process of elimination tells you the only thing you can control is yourself.orEridan tries to make things okay again in some of the most self-destructive of ways.
Relationships: Eridan Ampora & Feferi Peixes, Eridan Ampora & Sollux Captor, Eridan Ampora/Feferi Peixes
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	patient / fine / balanced / kind

**Author's Note:**

> whoo me back in the projection baybee!! fun fact i initially tried to write this with equius until i realized i had no clue how to write equius. anyway in case u didn't read the tags this is, in fact, a discussion of an ed. i don't give details on the disordered behaviours themselves because eating disorders are competitive so that would be a pretty unwise choice on my part. it's mostly an exploration of motivations and emotions and how eds can work as a coping mechanism (an unhealthy one, but i guess you're still technically coping? technically? idk). still, that can be triggering for people!! obviously!! so please don't read this if that's you. i would have marked this mature just to give people a moment to really consider but then i remembered that the mature rating is for uhhhhhh. s'x. and i didn't want to be misleading that would have been worse maybe. imagine you roll up to a fic expecting sm't and you're like hey that's kinda weird what's up with the shitty angsty song lyric title and the shitty angsty description and then you realize OH this is not s'x!! awkward. also please bear in mind that this is not the definitive experience of everyone who has had an ed!! it's just one instance, and there's a wide variety of emotions and motivations and all that shit.
> 
> now that the disclaimers r out of the way: if you currently have a restrictive ed (or any other kind of ed/mental illness for the record, i just can't speak for others) or want to engage in those behaviours, please, please talk to an adult you trust, like a parent or another relative or a doctor, whatever. please know how valuable you and your health and safety are. as cheesy at it is, you're not alone, and i promise things can always get better.

**v**  
Your name is Eridan Ampora, and now, you realize that you have done so many awful, awful things.

Just. God. You’re not stupid, okay? Can we get that out of the way first? You’re not stupid. You’d consider yourself quite the opposite, actually. Smart people do stupid things too. Or not stupid, quite. _Stupid_ is so dismissive, makes everything about this small and trivial. It’s just irrational. Yeah, that’s it. You got too caught up in your emotions and then you paid the price. Part of you still thinks it was fair, though why you would choose to care about justice now is beyond you. You’ve always been a little bit of a masochist, but you never thought you would let this consume you so completely.

 **i**  
All at once, it seems, everything falls apart. Feferi leaves you for Sollux, and you fight Sollux, and you hurt him, and everyone hates you. It’s like a series of cracks spiderwebbing gradually up the walls of a pitcher. For a long time, not a drop leaks, so you ignore it until the thing finally breaks, its contents spilling out and over your clawing, grabbing hands and leaving you empty. You push the blame onto others—Sollux, for provoking you maddeningly with his taunts, Feferi, for leaving you in the first place, the rest of your so-called friends, for not defending you. You know, though, in your core, that it was your own fault, that you don’t know how to do anything but drive people away.

Shifting the blame is a farce, but you’ll buy into it readily when it’s the only thing keeping you from breaking down. There is nothing left in you except a gnawing feeling of weakness, an absence of power. You try to push it back as far as it can go. It chews your insides and growls in its sleep.

When everything falls apart, you need something to control, and process of elimination tells you the only thing you can control is yourself.

 **ii**  
For a while, you are content to fantasize, but daydreams can only go on so long before seeping into reality. It is a fatal error to believe that a man made of hunger can ever really be satisfied.

The prospect scares you at first. You’re not stupid, of course, you have the common sense to know that food is critical to survival. You’re well-informed, too—you research dental problems and hair problems and psychological side effects, and you know this sort of thing isn’t at all the easy thing movies and television shows portray it as. Still, the more you look into it, the less severe these losses seem in comparison to what you would be gaining. Stability. Triumph. Control. That scares you, too—how much this appeals to you—but it doesn’t negate your intrigue. And it certainly can’t get rid of that frenzied hunger for control. It’s awake now, scratching through your throat, whispering to you that _this_ is how you can take back control, _this_ is how you make things fine again.

The first time you give in, it’s supposed to be a one-off thing, just to satiate the burning need to feel agency in your life again.

It makes you feel powerful in a way you never thought anyone could feel. You would give anything to keep it.

 **iii**  
They noticed long ago, surely. Despite your strained relationships with them, they’re your only friends, or “friends”, and you’re always within each others’ vicinity. They see your fatigue, your growing irritability, your slipping grades. Still, none of them comment until someone offers you food and you refuse more adamantly than you should.

There’s a fight. They tell you they can’t take care of you forever. They tell you you’re _just as selfish as you’ve always been_.

It doesn’t break the habit or snap you back to your senses like they hoped it would. You knew that you were a bad person, undeserving of having the most basic of needs met, and this is confirmation. You can’t hide from yourself anymore. A farce is a poor one if you can’t even fool yourself.

You throw yourself into the disorder with what little you have left—a choked, desperate version of yourself, finally facing himself in the mirror after so long keeping it covered, and the hunger, and nothing else. Seeing yourself so justly miserable makes you just short of joyous.

 **iv**  
It never feels like a chore so much as a necessity, something you need to survive each day, but here’s the thing about addictions: they’re not sustainable. Your hormone receptors become more resistant to the effects of a drug, and you don’t get the same high as before. This isn’t a drug, sure, but you’re beginning to suspect that gradual fade can happen to anything given you do it for long enough.

You don’t know how to feel anymore about what you’ve done to yourself, and you can’t remember what it used to feel like, but you want to feel it again. You are grasping at straws, trying to figure out how to get that feeling back, until it hits you that you can’t. You’ve lost this too. You deny it at first, like you always do, but it’s a poor farce, like it always is, and once more everything is falling apart all at once. What you had left before, those last few droplets that stuck to each other stubbornly, evaporates gradually but undeniably, and for the first time, you really have nothing.

 **v, continued**  
You have done so many awful, awful things. You were an insatiable man made of hunger, and now you are nothing, but you are just as selfish and cruel as you have always been. You wish that the pitcher had never broken, that you had never ignored the warning signs, that you would have done something right to put it back together and fix it so you could be something else. You’re so tired of feeling incorporeal and helpless, and more than you have ever wanted before, you want to be something.

You know simply wishing for a thing doesn’t bring it to fruition. Something can’t be created from nothing, like a cup can’t be filled with vacuum. But there’s an expression, you think, that recognizing a problem is the first step to fixing it. Maybe it’s enough to want to be better. Wanting puts recovery within your grasp, and it’s been so long since you had anything to hold, since you could hold anything. It’s like watching sun begin to rise or the tide begin to come in—not the end goal, but a reminder of its inevitability, a promise that someday you can be again.


End file.
